It's not foxes, birds of prey or disease that is the biggest threat to piglets in the first four days of life, it's their own mother.
But groundbreaking new technology will protect millions of piglets from being accidentally crushed by their mothers every year.
US company SwineTech has created a device using smart camera technology and artificial intelligence to pinpoint a piglet's location looking at the wave lengths of its squeals and breath sequence.
Using a TENS unit (a chiropractic tool with electric pulse used on humans for muscle and nerve pain), the vibrations tell the sow to stand up if a piglet's breathing sequence changes.
"We have taken a device that is used on people and have identified what threshold it can be used on a pig so that it's not painful or stressful," SwineTech co founder and chief executive Matthew Rooda said.
"We are a welfare company, we save the pigs and help them out."
The technology will also be able to plot birth intervals to alert producers when labour exceeds 15 minutes so they can help the sow in this precarious time.
It will also have the potential to plot piglet weight, sow health and how often she stands.
Mr Rooda said it was important to track the behaviour of a sow on how many times she stands and sits, as producers spend hundreds of thousands of hours a year getting sows up.
Speaking at the Alltech ONE19 conference in Kentucky USA, Mr Rooda added producers would also be able to understand at-risk sows for disease as it measures respiration.
"What will be the big winner of what we do is nursing bouts, how often the sow is nursing and how it varies by genetics," Mr Rooda said.
Mr Rooda, a fourth generation in the pig industry, said 92 per cent of pork producers were actively looking for a solution to piglet crushing.
"More information is better for farmers as they have something tangible that helps them and veterinarians understand what sows need," he said.
"It will identify disease earlier than before, identify sows that are no longer lactating, prevent starves and identify changes in behaviours from nutrition. It will also streamline labour used in mundane tasks so producers can spend more time on newborn babies."
Mr Rooda said there were 210 million piglet deaths due to still births across the world (with one person managing 40 sows per birth) but US research had found that many of the deaths were not true stillborn.
"If you can have someone there when they are needed the most you can reduce the issue by 60 per cent," he said.
Mr Rooda said in a US trial there had been a 63 per cent reduction of deaths in three days. The technology will be available in Canada this month, South American by 2020. Mr Rooda said it would also suit the Australian pork industry.
The machine costs US$1500 with Mr Rooda explaining a typical producers of 5000 sows would save hundreds of thousands of dollars each year with piglet retention.
